People's Democracy

(Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of
India (Marxist)

Vol. XXXVI

No. 49

December 09, 2012

Silent Spring...Fifty
Years On

Raghu

THIS
column is admittedly,
and regrettably, late in running an article
commemorating the fiftieth year
after the publication in September 1962 of Rachel
Carsons’ Silent Spring, arguably one of the most
influential books of our
time. Many tributes and reviews of Silent
Spring, not only on this half-centenary but even
earlier over the past
several decades, have hailed the book as marking the
beginning of the
environmental movement in the West or even, in some
sense, in the world. That
is somewhat of an overstatement, although not an
unforgivable one. It would be a
far closer description of its epochal character to
recognise, as unfortunately few
have done, that Silent
Spring heralded
a new way of looking at science and technology (S&T)
and its relation to
society in the second half of the twentieth century.

Silent Spring was a book about
the immense harm being done to
nature, particularly to flora and fauna, and to people,
by chemical
insecticides especially DDT
(dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), and about the
surreptitious and systematic manner in which
corporations and collusive
government agencies manufactured, promoted and
distributed new chemicals and
hid their harmful effects from the public. A working
scientist herself, Rachel
Carsons used a wide range of painstakingly gathered hard
evidence to support her
argument that synthetic pesticides such as DDT and other
organo-chlorides such
as heptachlor were being excessively and
indiscriminately used with callous
disregard to their ill-effects on human health, animal
life and the environment
in general. As Carsons
powerfully imagined it, these excesses could eventually
lead to the destruction
of the ecosystem, to the disappearance of birds and
insects, and the cessation of
their activities and sounds – hence Silent
Spring.

The
book sold an amazing
150,000 copies in its first edition, generated huge
public awakening, attracted
wide support from the scientific community and drew the
attention of government
agencies including then US
President John F Kennedy who set up a committee to study
the use of pesticides.
Over the next few years, this and similar other
processes led in the US and
many other developed countries to stringent restrictions
on the use of DDT and,
on a broader front, to a series of regulatory measures
relating to chemicals,
industrial pollution and environmental damage in
general.

Rachel
Carsons knew that
she was challenging powerful players, that she would
incur the wrath of the
corporate-industrial establishment and its apologists in
academia, the
political-administrative set up and in civil society.
And she did. Silent
Spring was viciously attacked,
its findings and methods ridiculed, and Rachel Carsons
herself was personally
vilified.Corporate
spokespersons
labelled her a fanatic, scientists working in the
chemicals industry called her
emotional and romantic, and several politicians on the
Right even charged her
with acting on behalf of “sinister forces” (read the
then Soviet Union) which
wanted to undermine US agriculture! Many of these wild
charges are repeated to
this day, and have become part of the right-wing
harangue against any and all
opinions that challenge, or could even support a
challenge to, the corporate-industrial
complex and its manipulation of the science and use of
technology.

Fifty
years after Silent
Spring, there is still
considerable debate on the supposed benefits and hazards
of DDT and, more
broadly, on the extent to which environmentalists
exaggerate dangers from
different industrial products and processes, and
therefore on the extent and
kind of regulation required. But few would contest the
idea that the chemicals industry
is no longer viewed as a benign provider of synthesised
products of undoubted
benefit to humankind, or as a set of harmless factories
in the countryside.
Indeed, the very notion that science and technology,
especially as harnessed
and deployed by ever more powerful corporations, always
works for societal
betterment is increasingly being questioned. The
consequent need for greater
social accountability, if not social control, is also
being more sharply realised
and more vocally asserted. In much academic literature,
and as reflected in
various international conferences, this phenomenon has
been recognised as a
fundamental change in the social contract of science,
that is, a shift in what
science and technology are expected to deliver to
society, how this is to be
monitored and ensured, and how people would participate
in shaping the relevant
institutions and processes. Quite apart from the
specifics in the book, these
are the questions that Silent Spring
posed and which societies continue to confront today.

DDT
AND

PESTICIDES

Rachel
Carsons did not, as
many of her critics propagate, argue that DDT is evil by
definition or that
pesticides should never be used. Nor did she actually
posit a definitive causal
relationship between contact with DDT and cancer. As
someone who herself was
afflicted with breast cancer and who succumbed to it in
1964, Rachel Carsons was
very careful in her pronouncements especially because
she did not want to be
accused of subjective bias.Nor did her
work lead to a total ban on DDT, which then caused
hindrances to the campaign
against malaria, as her critics accuse. Anticipating the
precautionary
principle which came to be accepted by scientists much
later, her main argument
was to thoroughly investigate and proceed with abundant
caution.

She
wrote, “It is not my
contention that chemical insecticides must
never be used… [but that] we have put poisonous and
biologically potent
chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons
largely or wholly ignorant
of their potentials for harm. I contend furthermore
that we have allowed these
chemicals to be used with little or no advance
investigation of their effect on
soil, water, wildlife, and man himself.”

In 1972, after
extensive investigations, the Environment Protection
Agency prohibited the
widespread application of DDT in the US
for pest control in agriculture,
that is to say, aerial or other spraying of entire
fields and wetlands. Scientists
have found incontrovertible evidence, verified many
times over since then in
different parts of the world and by all relevant
international organisations, that
DDT is highly toxic to all forms of animal life and to
humans, and persists in
the environment for a long time of over 200 years. When
sprayed in fields, DDT
is absorbed in the soil from where it is gradually
released into the
atmosphere, and enters into the food chain where it gets
magnified the higher
up the chain it goes. Indeed, one of the factors that
gave impetus to Silent
Spring and the anti-DDT campaign
in the US
was the
correlation thought to have been established between the
rapidly dwindling
population of the iconic US
national bird, the bald eagle, and the widespread
agricultural use of DDT.

But DDT was
never totally banned. It continued to be manufactured in
the US
well into the 1980s and, in fact, is still
legal even in the US
for import and use subject to restrictions as above. DDT
continues to be
prohibited in the EU. DDT is one of 12 Persistent
Organic Pollutants prohibited
in 2001 under the Stockholm Convention which, however,
allowed for
country-specific exceptions. India
is among those nations that sought exception for
non-agricultural uses, mainly for
use against malaria and kala-azar parasites and
carriers. India,
which had banned agricultural use of DDT
in 1989, remains one of the world’s largest producers
and users of the
substance, China
having ceased production in 2007.

In 2006, the
World Health Organisation responded to continuing high
incidence of malaria in Africa,
but also in other parts of the world, by revoking
the prohibition on DDT and once again permitting its use
in Indoor Residual
Spraying (IRS) against malaria vectors and parasites.
The rationale given was
that, when used in small controlled quantities, spraying
DDT on the inside roof
and wall surfaces of homes and animal shelters proves
very effective against
mosquitoes. The move received support from then
President George W Bush’s
President’s Malaria Initiative and was also, of course,
hailed by right-wing
DDT proponents in the US
who, otherwise anti-UN, now argued that the WHO
endorsement disproved the “junk
science and myths” which had prompted the prohibitions
in the first place.

However, the
case for even controlled use of DDT remains
controversial. For one, DDT
continues to be universally prohibited in agriculture.
Its persistence in the
environment remains high, several times above prescribed
limits, despite
several decades of ban, as recent studies in Europe and
Canada
have
shown. (In this context, why the Indian government and a
section of scientists
want to continue with agricultural spraying of
endosulfan, often described as
DDT’s cousin, remains a puzzle.) Further, the WHO
exception stresses that the
permission for DDT is only for those regions where
vectors are still
susceptible to it. This is the give-away. India
used DDT extensively in the
1960s and ‘70s, but later found the mosquitoes had
developed resistance to it,
as happens with all insects with respect to all
insecticides. After
discontinuation of DDT for almost three decades,
mosquitoes naturally became
once again susceptible to it. This is the classic
“pesticide treadmill” in
which, insects develop resistance to one set of
pesticides, then new pesticides
are developed and deployed, to which too the pests
develop resistence after
some years, and so on and on!

Fifty
years after Silent
Spring, the question posed by the
book remains relevant: “How
could intelligent
beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a
method that contaminated the
entire environment and brought the threat of disease
and death even to their
own kind?”

AGRO-INDUSTRIAL

MENACE

What also
continues to be relevant after all these fifty years is
the menace posed by
agro-chemical industries which, despite all the popular
awareness and the
regulatory mechanisms, have only become larger, stronger
and have today come to
dominate agriculture and the food business the world
over. The production and
widespread promotion of hazardous agro-chemicals
continues unabated, showing
that these corporations are driven by far more insidious
and powerful economic
and political forces of global capitalism.

The
seminal role played by Silent Spring
appears to be endorsed by the raft of environmental
legislations in the US,
Europe and
other countries and by the many global regulatory
instruments adopted since
then. In the US,
the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) came into being
in 1970 and the Clean
Water Act was passed in 1972. In its official history,
the EPA itself
acknowledges its debt to Silent Spring
which, it says, “played in the
history of
environmentalism roughly the same role that ‘Uncle
Tom’s Cabin’ played in the
[anti-slavery] abolitionist movement. In fact, EPA
today may be said without
exaggeration to be the extended shadow of Rachel
Carson.”

Not that Silent Spring
was alone in highlighting
the threats posed by chemical industries. Besides the
use of chemical warfare
agents going back to the first World War, and the
extensive and debilitating
use by the US of Napalm and defoliating Agent Orange in
Vietnam, numerous
industrial disasters dramatically revealed the dangers
to human populations
posed not only by the amateur use of many chemicals but
even by their
manufacture and storage under supposedly safe,
controlled conditions in
factories run by technically trained specialists.
Everyone knows about the
chemical fire on the highly polluted Cuyahoga River in
the US, the Minamata
mercury poisoning in Japan, and India’s own horror, the
Bhopal Gas Disaster
resulting from release of deadly gases from a plant
manufacturing pesticides.
The world now has, besides the Stockholm Convention, the
Rotterdam Convention
on Hazardous Chemicals, the Basel Treaty on the
Trans-national Movement of
Hazardous Materials and so on. In India, we were
supposed to have instituted a
host of regulations and controls over industries
manufacturing and storing
hazardous materials, but as a string of thankfully less
horrific industrial
“accidents” since Bhopal have shown, we have learned
very few lessons.

Anyone
reading Silent
Spring now would
probably be surprised at how much was already known in
1962 about the harmful
effects of a wide range of agro-chemicals on the ecology
including humans. What
should cause even more astonishment, if not alarm, is
how little our societies
have learnt about, and how little we have done to
regulate, the activities of
the burgeoning agro-chemicals sector.